The emergence of a new breed of commercial open source company, challenging the dominance of public cloud, has set off a licensing war that calls into question the very meaning of open source. We debated this topic at last month’s GrafanaCon Los Angeles, where I participated in a spirited panel. Since then, the battle lines have been redrawn. Last week, Amazon announced its Open Distribution for Elasticsearch. And MongoDB Inc. abandoned OSI approval of its new SSPL license.

In the following example-driven tutorial we will learn how to use Prometheus metrics / OpenMetrics to instrument your code whether you are using Golang, Java, Python or Javascript. We will cover the different metric types and provide readily executable code snippets. Prometheus is an open source time series database for monitoring that was originally developed at SoundCloud before being released as an open source project.

Rapitt built their partner store app on top of Mattermost to create a platform that facilitates local commerce. Rapitt digitally connects local business owners with customers to enable specific use cases and transactions—like storing items for a period of time (e.g., a suitcase) and serving as a key-handling solution (e.g., Airbnb hosts can use Rapitt to provide keys to guests).

The number of open source components in proprietary apps continues to rise—a 2018 code audit found that there were 257 open source components per proprietary application. The same audit found that 57 percent of the average proprietary application codebase was open source.

When I tell people that Sentry is open source, they nod, understanding that this is known to be a good, noble thing. Then, they have questions. Many questions. “You mean open core?” they ask. No. Open source. “So you sell professional services?” No. Head scratching, then a pause. “Then… how do you make money?”

Work should be fun. Sometimes it’s not, especially when your full-time job isn’t aligned with something you care about — like open source. Contributing to open source full-time is an opportunity not available to everyone. We’d like to change that with the Sentry Open Source Grant, which offers funding to an individual dedicated to working on an open source project for three months.

Loki and Grafana are a perfect match. The backend is kept lean and space-efficient, while the user interface allows ad-hoc field parsing and simple statistics. This post details some of the UX goals we had to deliver logs simpler and faster.

This blog post is a companion piece for my talk at https://devopsdaysindia.org. I will discuss the motivations, architecture, and the future of logging in Grafana! Let’s get right down to it. You can see the slides for the talk here.

At Monitorama 2018, I shared some of the cool process and knowledge I’ve learned from developing a product for people other than myself to consume. After spending six years on call, I now build software that wakes people up in the night — AKA, infrastructure and tooling for systems monitoring and performance analysis. As someone who’s been there, I’m conscientious about building quality software that people delight in using.

This is a short piece highlighting how open source and enhanced open source software like GroundWork and others (we can use big examples like Atlassian and Cloudera) are now taken as mainstream components for many company toolsets. There is a concept in selling products that are “sticky,” or that are not easily or cost-effectively changed out.